The cornerstone to my thinking about information literacy these days is this:Information comes in many forms and flows through many channels.Information literacy then entails developing understandings of different forms and different channels, how and why it is put together, how and why it is distributed and received, how and why it is organized, and various issues of connection and context. So when we talk about media literacy we're talking about an aspect of information literacy. When we talk about visual literacy we're talking about a form of information. Digital literacy touches on both forms of information and channels it flows through. Forms and channels will evolve over time, so literacy is something that we are always developing.

Domain literacy is a term I hadn't thought of before today, when I encountered Kin Lane's post, What I Mean When I Say Domain Literacy. But I have said in the past that knowing how to work on the web is as essential as knowing how to work with Word. That why I advocate for the Domain of One's Own initiative everywhere I go. Understanding domains is part of understanding information processes. It's part of understanding the value of information. It's part of understanding authority. And the best way to develop these understandings is to get your hands dirty working in your own domain. Some tell me that this is not a library issue, and perhaps they're right, but I say it ought to be.

The cornerstone to my thinking about information literacy these days is this:Information comes in many forms and flows through many channels.Information literacy then entails developing understandings of different forms and different channels, how and why it is put together, how and why it is distributed and received, how and why it is organized, and various issues of connection and context. So when we talk about media literacy we're talking about an aspect of information literacy. When we talk about visual literacy we're talking about a form of information. Digital literacy touches on both forms of information and channels it flows through. Forms and channels will evolve over time, so literacy is something that we are always developing.

Domain literacy is a term I hadn't thought of before today, when I encountered Kin Lane's post, What I Mean When I Say Domain Literacy. But I have said in the past that knowing how to work on the web is as essential as knowing how to work with Word. That why I advocate for the Domain of One's Own initiative everywhere I go. Understanding domains is part of understanding information processes. It's part of understanding the value of information. It's part of understanding authority. And the best way to develop these understandings is to get your hands dirty working in your own domain. Some tell me that this is not a library issue, and perhaps they're right, but I say it ought to be.

Now, more than ever before, people are desperately in need of skills that will help them determine what is worthy of their attention, and how to effectively study and learn over their lifetime in this increasingly ill-structured and information-rich environment.

Those skills are what we call information literacy - the key to lifelong learning. I hadn't thought about it before, but I can see his point that adaptive/personalized learning stunts IL development. It's an attempt to inject content and knowledge into the learner, learning with training wheels, when it would be better to empower/enable the learner to explore, self-regulate and self-assess

The Twitterverse brought this article to my attention today. I like the idea of openness as an attitude and a state of mind. But the author raises an interesting question:

So does open scholarship require access to technology and basic digital literacies as a prerequisite for practice? I don’t think so… That would limit the potential and sustainability of open education; openness should be a worldview for an educator more than a technological possibility (although I love the possibilities).

I read that as seeing tech and literacy as a gateway to openness, a gate that's not necessarily open for everyone. So there's a closed-ness as well - a contradiction. I had been thinking about how there is a contradiction in open course too - a course, by definition, has a start and an end. When it becomes open-ended, like Cormier's Rhizo thing, does it stop being a course? If so, what do you call it? Or maybe we need to redefine it.

The post brought me back to Steve Wheeler's post on Open scholarship from a few months ago. I'm sure I must have seen it before, but I must have had other demands on my attention so I missed the impossible triangle connection. I agree with Goodfellow's assessment of the inherent tensions in online openness and open scholarship. Literacy and economics are barriers. Maybe we don't always see them when they're behind us, but they are there nonetheless.

And Goodfellow's article led me to his book, as if I really needed more to read. Every day an adventure...

The Seven Pillars are: Identify, Scope, Plan, Gather Evaluate, Manage, and Present. Each is divided into understandings (labelled "Understands") and application (labelled "Is able to"). The Open Content lens in aimed towards producers primarily - researchers, authors and professors. Learners are placed in a passive role, e.g. "Is able to: Assess how open content could enhance the learner experience." There should be a role for the learner as active participant, as a user, creator and sharer. On the other hand, this lens emphasizes the idea of information literacy as a continuum rather than a binary. The understandings and applications of this lens are far more relevant to those on the advanced end of the scale.